Tony Redmond

Exchange 2016 CU3 is the first version to support Windows 2016 as a deployment platform. At least, it was. Microsoft has discovered a problem lurking deep in the bowels of Windows 2016 that causes Exchange 2016 CU3 to crash when deployed in a database availability group (DAG). IIS is tagged as the problem child, but it’s really not.

A busy week with lots of new things to discuss in the world of Office 365. The Outlook for iOS client has a new scheduling assistant, Microsoft launched Teams, its hoped-for Slack-killer, Quest returns to full life, and Skype for Business is going to improve voice calls.

Delve makes it easy to find documents and other items stored in Office 365. Sometimes some surprising results show up after a search. Maybe Microsoft needs to adjust some filters!

Some recent changes made by Microsoft in how an Exchange Online mailbox is treated when an Office 365 license is removed from their owner’s account caused chaos for the account provisioning system of a large U.S. university. The changes actually make a lot of sense, but it’s bad when Microsoft makes changes like this without warning anyone.

Microsoft’s Q1 FY17 results contain the news that the annualized revenue run rate for commercial cloud products is now over $13 billion. Perhaps even more interesting is the news that the new official figure for Office 365 monthly active users is 85 million. At this rate, the 100 million barrier will be cracked in early 2017.

Some interesting announcements during the last week informed us about Yammer getting better at compliance and a new Office 365 connector. I’m not so hot on the bots, though. In other news, MyAnalytics has an unexplained love for Internet Explorer and the topic of password trimming and the Office 365 maximum password length caused some confusion – at least for one administrator! And some news about an interesting Exchange 20th anniversary video and a VDI collaboration project between VMware and Microsoft for Skype for Business rounds out the week.

It’s frustrating when a promised feature isn’t available. Microsoft announced auto-expanding archive mailboxes for Exchange Online in June 2016, but Office 365 customers have reported that their storage quota is limited to 170GB. That’s a lot of space, but hardly the “truly bottomless archive” that Microsoft promised. What’s going on?

Ignite is two weeks gone, but there’s still lots of work to reveal all the sessions that I missed. The OneDrive roadmap was one such session, and it included some interesting figures for OneDrive usage. The Grand Exchange on-premises or cloud debate is also online and I also listened to how the dedicated team at Microsoft has lovingly assembled a profanity list for you to use. Finally, some reflections on transforming distribution groups to Office 365 Groups and what this means for mail contacts.

The Focused Inbox is the keynote feature of the Outlook for iOS and Android mobile clients. All other clients in the Outlook family have used the Clutter feature, which processes mail on the server and removes unimportant items into the Clutter folder. Now Microsoft is dropping Clutter and introducing the Focused Inbox across the entire Outlook family. Rationalization and commonality is good, especially when features that really work are made available to all clients. Here’s how the changeover will occur.

A relaxed week between the bedlam of Ignite and the calmness of the IT/DEV Connections conference in Las Vegas gives me a chance to catch up with some of the less-important but still worthy things I learned about recently. The Exchange team celebrated the 20th anniversary of the product, another of its leaders joined the Microsoft SLT, email from Paul Robichaux caused some problems, and the new Office 365 Admin Center finally reached general availability.